GOOGLE HAS launched a new feature for its Gmail service that it says could save users hours a week currently lost to “information overload”.
The “priority inbox” setting streamlines a user’s inbox based on their behaviour, promoting important mail to the top of the screen while filtering the rest.
“We’d like to think we’re doing a very good job of helping people find what’s important to them online,” said Xen Lategan, regional lead at Google’s Enterprise Engineering team in the UK. “However, information overload is not purely on the web, it’s also in information closer to you. We think priority inbox is the holy grail of what people are trying to achieve to solve this.”
According to Mr Lategan, the priority inbox feature is based on Gmail’s existing spam filter and assigns a status to an e-mail based on its sender and content. However, it also factors in the user’s actions so if an e-mail is received from someone they regularly reply to, it will be automatically deemed important.
Gmail users who activate the feature will now see their inbox split into three sections, with priority mails at the top, those the users “star” as favourites in the middle and everything else at the bottom.
If the priority inbox is mis-judging the importance of mails, users can manually mark them by clicking a plus or minus button, though Mr Lategan hopes they will not have to do this too often.
“We’re hoping that people just keep doing what they do naturally on their inbox. It tries to learn from your normal interactions with the system so the more natural they are the better,” he said.
According to the Radicati Group, over 294 billion e-mails are sent on a daily basis, with that figure set to nearly double by 2013. At present the typical corporate user receives about 110 messages per day.
In pre-launch testing among Google employees and selected companies using Gmail, there was a 6 per cent decline in the time individuals spent browsing mail. There was also a 13 per cent decline in the time spent reading unwanted mail, which Mr Lategan said was the area he had hoped to see results in.
“This is one of those beautiful problems that Google loves to solve,” he said. “This is definitely something that we will keep improving.”
